Jordan Peterson: The Development of Aggressive Children

so if you take children and you group them together in age age in groups defined by age so let's say a 32 year olds 33 year olds 34 year olds all the way up to 18 and then you watch them interact and you code their behavior for kicking biting fighting and property theft then what you'll find is that the two year olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot so that's pretty interesting you know because you think well children are naturally peaceful and if they're aggressive it's because they learn it it's like no that's true for a small minority of children but there's a substantial number of children who are aggressive at to by nature most of them are male now that doesn't mean most children are like that because they're not even if you look at two year-olds who are the most aggressive human beings most two-year-olds aren't aggressive but some of them are and most of those are male okay so then let's say you identify this cohort of aggressive two-year-olds and you track them across time track them for the next two to four years or the next track them until they're four years old what you find is the vast majority of the hyper aggressive male two-year-olds get socialized perfectly well so by the time they're four they're temperamental II probably still more aggressive but they've become civilized little monsters so other people can tolerate them and that means that they've had parents or peers or educational experiences that enable them to learn how to interact productively with other kids and to bring their aggressive nature under control some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play and that's one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats for example it's vital to them but it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids and rough-and-tumble play which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids by the way not not before nine months because they're just too little but once they become ambulatory and you know kind of puppy like so that they're a little bit more robust then you can play a lot with them and you can play with them right at the edge of danger to which kids absolutely they absolutely go nuts for they love that so when I had little kids I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together and I'd bring them on there and you know toss them up in the air and catch them you know eight 10 feet no no no a foot in the air and catch them and they'd go like this and then you know I'd catch them and they'd laugh and I'd throw them up and they're all freaked out and then they'd laugh and you know so they're learning trust with that in an embodied way and they're also learning and this is from stretching them out and wrestling them and twisting them around and letting them pull on your hair and hit you and all of those things they learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn't you want to kind of push them to the edge you know so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what's still within the realm of the game and you do the same thing when they're wrestling with you so they learn not to little awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye or or or or do things that are actually painful like grab your lip and pull it you know it's like no no you let go of my lip you know and so that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses and and help the church child find a more appropriate embodiment you could think that what you're doing in some sense when you're rough-and-tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance because that is what you're doing you know you're making them comfortable in their bodies in all of its extension and building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well situated inside themselves and so that's something to really think about you know when it's it it's appalling we know that the ability to engage in rough-and-tumble play among rats inhibits aggression impulsive aggressive aggression among rats we also know that if you deprive rats of the ability to it of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play they show prefrontal cortical developmental deficits and manifest behaviors that are akin to attention deficit disorder which you can then treat with ritalin and so one of the things that's happening with boys because they're way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls is that there are natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn't appropriate for a school environment where you're just supposed to sit down and shut up and so the kids get hyperactive and instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted which is exactly what you should do you know you medicate them so that there are exploratory systems which are the activity of which is facilitated by the by the dopaminergic agonist that's the ADHD medication suppresses the play function it's absolutely appalling there's no excuse for it you know but it's a good it's a good indictment of the education system because why in the world would you take six year old kids and get them to sit without moving for five hours unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid why in the world would you train them to do that well it's easier that's one thing you know and and when they're sitting there there's nothing disruptive about the rough-and-tumble play and that can be quite you know play can be quite disruptive so anyways most of these kids are reasonably well socialized by the time they're the age of four using one mechanism or another they learn how to regulate their aggression and they learn how to engage in fictional play structures with other kids they learn how to cooperate and compete and the advantage to having a well socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way so if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized that person can be quite quite the creature you know because they're very they're very forward moving in their nature and very difficult to stop but if you don't get them successfully domesticated tamed roughly speaking by the time they're four their peers reject them and that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four like you got it you want to burn that into your brain because people don't know that that's your job and here's here's why you say it's it's easy if you think about it carefully so you imagine you've got a you've got a three-year-old child so sort of halfway through that initial period of socialization and you take that child out in public okay what do you want for the child who cares about you what do you want from the child for the child you want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her and so the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly and if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining the mower you don't know how to do that properly then what they're going to do is they're going to it's nothing but rejection from other children and false smiles from other parents and adults and that's so then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying and that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the well-being of your child if your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much and pay attention and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary then and you know and share and play properly then when they meet other kids the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them and that's going to go well and then they're going to go off and socialize each other for the rest of their lives because that's what happens is that from four years old onwards the primary socialization with children takes place among other children and so if the kids don't get in on that early they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind and you can imagine how terrible that is because a four-year-old will not play with another four-year-old who's two but a five-year-old certainly will not play with a five-year-old who's two right because the gap is just starting to get unbelievably large and so the kids start out behind and then the peers leave them behind and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life well those are the ones that grow up to be long-term antisocial right they're already aggressive it doesn't dip down now what happens to normal boys roughly speaking imagine the aggressive two-year-old types they get socialized so their level of aggression goes down and then they hit puberty and testosterone kicks in and bang levels of aggression go back up and so that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of 16 and about 25 so when it matches the creativity curve by the way it's so cool if you look at the spike of creativity among men 16 to 25 and it starts to go down criminality matches that absolutely perfectly so that's quite cool so and part of so the testosterone levels rate raise the average level of aggression among men it's more dominance than aggression actually in testosterone is by no means all bad and then it starts to decrease at about age 25 or 26 which is usually with men stop staying up late at night stop drinking as much develop a full-time career and take on burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family and so also that's that's the development of what would I what I would call predatory aggression because I also think that the the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression versus maternal sympathy it's something like that so if you look at other if you look at other mammals that are predators because we're predators as well as prey animals if you look at other animals like bears the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants in fact the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants and maybe even to eat them so there's no matter analogy at all in solitary male mammalian predators now it depends on how social they are but roughly speaking that's the situation whereas with human beings males are quite maternal so but anyways I think the I think the the the extreme of agreeableness on the low end so disagreeableness is predation and the extreme on the upper end is maternal carry and so and those two things compete right obviously it's very difficult to be both of those at the same time and so men of course in the wild so to speak are very very few women hunt in modern societies or in or in archaic societies and you can also understand why that is because hunting actually requires hurting something killing it and it's usually something that's not very impressed about being hurt or killed and that will emit a lot of distress while it's happening and so for anybody who's compassionate who's who's got compassionate you know one of the fundamental elements of their temperament that's something they're just not going to be able to tolerate at all so there's you know in the evolutionary landscape because that's really what we're talking about there's tension behind the development of different modes of being in the world in it if you're good at one thing that sometimes means that you can't be good at the other thing at the same time

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 501,173

Keywords: Male, socialized, parenting, parents, experience, nature, psychology, education, school, learning, growing up, cooperate, disagreeable, group, children, child, psychologist, tips, maternal, caring, mother, father

Id: 2o4Og5PBM50

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019